Sweeping jet impingement heat transfer on a simulated turbine vane leading edge

Abstract

With the development of additive manufacturing technology, it is now possible to design complex and integrated internal cooling architecture for a gas turbine engine. In search of a spatially uniform heat transfer at the leading edge of a turbine nozzle guide vane, a sweeping jet impingement cooling strategy was proposed. Experiments were conducted in a low-speed wind tunnel to investigate sweeping jet impingement cooling in a faired cylinder leading edge model at an engine-relevant Biot number (Bi). Sweeping jets were generated with additively manufactured fluidic oscillator and steady jets were produced by a cylindrical orifice (with length to diameter ratio of 1). Both sweeping and steady jets were studied at varying mass flow rates, jet-to-wall spacing (H/D), jet pitch (P/D), and freestream turbulence. The effect of varying aspect ratio (AR) of the sweeping jet geometries was also studied. The overall cooling effectiveness of each configuration was estimated using infrared thermography (IR) measurements of the external surface temperature of the leading edge model. The sweeping jet provided higher overall cooling effectiveness values compared to steady jet in specific configurations. The pressure drop across each jet was also measured for each geometry, and the sweeping jet shows comparable pressure drop to steady jet.